The Second Book of General Ignorance (25 page)

Eight is too many.

You lose water every second of the day through excreting, sweating or simply breathing, so you need to take in liquid to avoid becoming dehydrated. But the advice that you should drink eight glasses of water a day is just plain wrong.

In 1945 a
British Medical Journal
report advised that adults should consume 2.5 litres of water daily but specified that ‘most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods’. In the sixty years since, this important final sentence seems to have fallen by the wayside. A normal diet contains enough embedded water for us, theoretically, not to need to drink anything at all.

Drinking lots of glasses of water on top of your normal consumption of food and drink will only make you urinate more.

It’s often said that drinking water is good for flushing out your system and keeping your skin blemish-free, but the evidence is patchy. Your kidneys may be helped to remove excess salt in the short term but unless you’ve been overdosing
on crisps (or alcohol) there is no particular benefit. Chronic dehydration makes your skin drier and less elastic, but taking in extra water won’t remove your wrinkles and it’s unlikely to stop you from getting spots.

Treating dehydration involves more than just water. You need to replace sugar and salts as well, so try eating watermelons. They’re rich in sugar, as well as calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium. Papaya’s good, too, as are coconut, cucumber and celery.

The salts and sugar are necessary because they help transport the water around the body. If you find watermelons spoil the line of your safari suit, you can buy sachets of rehydration powders from chemists and travel agents. These contain glucose and salts – but you’ll still need to source your own water to dissolve them in – which is where watermelons win: they’re 92 per cent water.

Too much water, on the other hand, can be lethal. ‘Water intoxication’ or hyponatremia (from Greek
hypo
, ‘under’, Latin
natrium
, ‘sodium’ and Greek
haima
, ‘blood’) is caused by over-dilution of essential body salts. Excess water is expelled from the blood into other cells, which then expand and rupture – leading to nausea, headaches, disorientation and, eventually, death.

Saunas do many things, but ‘sweating out the body’s toxins’ isn’t one of them.

Sweat is 99 per cent water, with tiny amounts of salt and other minerals. Its function is to cool the body as the water evaporates from the skin, not to remove waste products. It’s
the liver and kidneys that deal with any toxins in the body, converting them into something useful, or arranging for them to be excreted.

Nor does a sauna necessarily help you get rid of a hangover. Fifteen minutes in a sauna can lead to the loss of 1.5 litres (2½ pints) of sweat. Unless you drink lots of water to compensate, sweating heavily will only make you more dehydrated. Dehydration puts your kidneys under stress, which slows down the elimination of alcohol from your system.

What a sauna
can
do well is clean your skin, by opening your pores as you sweat. A fifteen-minute session at a temperature of 70 °C and 40 per cent humidity raises the body’s surface temperature by 10 °C and its internal temperature by 3 °C. This increases blood flow to the skin and makes the lungs work harder, increasing the intake of oxygen by up to 20 per cent – which is why endurance athletes often use saunas as part of their training.

A sauna followed by a cold shower generates feel-good endorphins in the brain, and can be used to treat mild depression. Research at the Thrombosis Institute in London has shown that the sauna–cold water combination also strengthens the immune system by increasing the number of white blood cells that fight disease. Saunas can also reduce the pain of arthritis and the Finns swear by them as a cure for the common cold.

Though ‘sauna’ is a Finnish word, the
idea
of the sauna is an ancient one. Writing in the fifth century
BC
, the Greek historian Herodotus described how the Scythians, a nomadic tribe from Iran, used small tents for the purpose, in which they burned cannabis on the hot stones – so they got high as well as clean. ‘The Scythians’, he wrote, ‘enjoy it so much that they howl with pleasure.’ The Apaches of North America have always used ‘sweat lodges’ made from willow frames covered with skins, in which up to twelve people sit naked around
heated rocks. These are periodically soused with water to make steam, cleansing both body and spirit.

The sauna has a similar spiritual significance for the Finns. Traditionally it was a place for the family to gather, for women to give birth and for the dead to be washed before burial. An old Finnish saying is
unassa ollaan kuin kirkossa
– ‘behave in a sauna as in a church’.

Finns who break this rule run the risk of being punished by the only permanent resident of the sauna, the
saunatonttu,
or ‘sauna elf’.

The word ‘sauna’ is one of only two expressions in English borrowed from the Finnish language. The other is ‘Molotov cocktail’.

It doesn’t usually have any effect at all.

The idea that alcohol ‘stops antibiotics working’ was first put about in the venereal disease clinics set up after the Second World War. Penicillin, identified by Alexander Fleming in 1928, had proved particularly effective at clearing up sexually transmitted infections. It was prescribed with the strict instruction not to drink while taking it. The reason for this was psychological rather than pharmaceutical. Drunken people are more likely to jump at the chance of casual sex. By scaring their patients into not drinking, doctors and nurses were giving the drug a chance to work before the infection could be passed on.

This advice became standard medical practice, and it worked: most people still avoid alcohol when on a course of
antibiotics. It’s true that it’s not a good idea to drink
heavily
on antibiotics, because the alcohol competes with the drug for ‘processing time’ in your liver. This means the drug may work a little more slowly. What it won’t do is stop it working altogether.

Of over a hundred types of antibiotic available for prescription, only five are listed as having serious side effects if taken with alcohol.

Of these, the only one commonly prescribed is Metronidazole, which is used to combat some dental and gynaecological infections and for treating
Clostridium difficile
, a bacterial infection picked up in hospitals. The drug prevents the body from breaking down alcohol properly, leading to a build up in the blood of the highly toxic chemical acetaldehyde – a close relative of formaldehyde, better known as embalming fluid. The effects are similar to an extremely bad hangover: vomiting, increased heart rate and severe headaches.

In 1942 the American microbiologist Selman Waksman (1888–1973) – and his student Albert Schatz (1922–2005) – discovered streptomycin, the first drug to be effective against tuberculosis. Waksman described it as ‘antibiotic’ (from the Greek
anti
‘against’ and
bios
‘life’) because it killed living bacteria.

Antibiotics are powerless against colds or flu, which are viral infections. It’s not clear what viruses are, or even if they can be said to be ‘alive’. They have genes (but no cells) and can only reproduce using a host organism. Scientists tend to refer to them as ‘biological entities’ or ‘organisms at the edge of life’.

What
does
stop antibiotics working is not alcohol but overprescription. In farming 70 per cent of the antibiotics used are given to perfectly healthy animals. In medicine new strains of bacteria have become resistant to former ‘wonder drugs’
like streptomycin and the World Health Organisation estimates that a third of the world’s population now carries a drug-resistant strain of TB. There are fears that as many as 35 million people may die from it before 2020.

LSD, cocaine, speed?

None of the above. Medically speaking, a ‘narcotic’ is an opium derivative, such as morphine. A slightly looser definition might include any drug that causes unconsciousness – technically known as ‘narcosis’, from the Greek
narke,
meaning ‘numbness’ or ‘torpor’.

Law enforcement agencies in the USA use the word ‘narcotic’ as a blanket term to mean
any
illegal drug – even though many of them are anything but narcotic in their effects, and many true narcotics, like codeine, are legal.

To avoid this confusion the medical profession now refers to opium – and its derivatives and man-made substitutes – as ‘opioids’. Opium is made from
Papaver somniferum
, a type of poppy which has been grown as a medicinal herb for thousands of years.

Nowadays opioids are mostly used in pain control, a task for which they are unrivalled. Though dependence on opioid painkillers is a common result of long-term use, actual addiction is very rare. In 2001 the American Pain Society defined addiction as ‘compulsive and continued use of a drug despite harm’. The most common side effect of prescribed narcotics is constipation.

In the nineteenth century, opioids were freely available over the counter. Heroin, discovered by the same man (Felix
Hoffman) in the same year (1897) as aspirin, was originally a brand name and was marketed as a cough mixture. One of its supposed virtues was that it wasn’t habit-forming. At the time, the medical authorities were much more worried about green tea, which was believed to cause anaemia, convulsions, hallucinations and suffocation.

Britain is currently aiming to become self-sufficient in home-grown opium poppies to ensure a regular supply of the powerful painkiller diamorphine (otherwise known as heroin) for those suffering from cancer or recovering from surgery. In the past, the UK has depended on imports from the Far East.

Despite a 40 per cent fall in production since 2008, Afghanistan still supplies 90 per cent of the world’s opium. More than half of this comes from Helmand province, the main stronghold of the Taliban insurgents. According to the UN, the Afghan government manages to intercept only 2 per cent of the opium that is produced.

In 2009 the British army sprang into action and, shortly afterwards, the Ministry of Defence announced that they had seized 1.3 tons of ‘a new strain of super poppy seeds’, thus denying the Taliban revenue of some £247 million. The Ministry was later forced to admit that what the army had actually got hold of was 1,100 kilos of mung beans, a staple of the Afghan diet.

Not by using a defibrillator.

If you think otherwise, you’ve been watching too many medical dramas on TV. Electricity is only used when the heart is beating irregularly. If it has stopped completely, attempts to re-establish a heartbeat take the form of regular intravenous injections of adrenaline and other drugs. Survival rates for such patients are fewer than one in fifty.

The two main forms of irregular heartbeat are (1) the heart beating too fast or
ventricular tachycardia
(from the Greek
tachys
, ‘fast’, and
kardia
, ‘heart’) and (2) the random quivering known as
ventricular fibrillation
(from the Latin
fibrilla
, ‘fibre’, because the heart is a mass of twitching fibres). Both conditions are usually the result of a heart attack, brought on by a failure in blood supply to the heart muscle. If the flow of blood to the brain becomes so irregular that the patient loses consciousness and stops breathing, the heart attack has become a ‘cardiac arrest’ and requires immediate medical attention. Brain damage begins four minutes after the flow of blood has stopped.

It is at this point that the electric paddles, or defibrillator, are used to stimulate the heart muscle to return to a regular rhythm. If this takes place within three to five minutes of the onset of an arrest, then there is a 74 per cent chance of a normal heartbeat being restored and a one in three chance of survival. In 2007 the UK Department of Health announced that the 681 defibrillators installed at airports, railway stations and shopping centres had saved 117 lives.

The first defibrillator used on a human was in 1947, under the supervision of Ohio surgeon Claude Beck. Sudden cardiac arrest remains the biggest cause of death in the Western world: more than 70,000 die from it each year in the UK.

Without access to a defibrillator, the chances of survival are much lower – about 1 in 25. Nevertheless, proper use of manual resuscitation techniques saves many lives by keeping the patient’s blood flowing until a defibrillator can be found. This is done by pressing rhythmically on the patient’s chest to pump blood through the heart (mouth-to-
mouth resuscitation is now deemed less effective). A steady beat is important and, for many years, first-aiders were taught to sing the song ‘Nelly the Elephant’ as they pumped. Now the recommendation is for faster chest compressions, so the 103 beats per minutes of the Bee Gee’s ‘Stayin’ Alive’ is preferred.

The face of the dummy still used to teach resuscitation techniques (known as ‘Rescue Annie’) is that of an unidentified young suicide pulled out of the river Seine in 1900. The pathologist at the morgue was so overcome by her beauty that he made a plaster cast of her face. Her tragic story made her a fashion icon for a whole generation of writers, artists and photographers.

When Peter Safar and Asmund Laerdal designed Rescue Annie in 1958, they had no idea that she would become the most kissed woman of all time.